Book Image

Exploring Experience Design

By : Ezra Schwartz
Book Image

Exploring Experience Design

By: Ezra Schwartz

Overview of this book

We live in an experience economy in which interaction with products is valued more than owning them. Products are expected to engage and delight in order to form the emotional bonds that forge long-term customer loyalty: Products need to anticipate our needs and perform tasks for us: refrigerators order food, homes monitor energy, and cars drive autonomously; they track our vitals, sleep, location, finances, interactions, and content use; recognize our biometric signatures, chat with us, understand and motivate us. Beautiful and easy to use, products have to be fully customizable to match our personal preferences. Accomplishing these feats is easier said than done, but a solution has emerged in the form of Experience design (XD), the unifying approach to fusing business, technology and design around a user-centered philosophy. This book explores key dimensions of XD: Close collaboration among interdisciplinary teams, rapid iteration and ongoing user validation. We cover the processes, methodologies, tools, techniques and best-practices practitioners use throughout the entire product development life-cycle, as ideas are transformed to into positive experiences which lead to perpetual customer engagement and brand loyalty.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Chapter 5. Experience - Perception, Emotions, and Cognition

"The experiencing self, lives its life continuously. It has moments of experience, one after the other."

- Daniel Kahneman

This chapter addresses the question: Experience. What is it?

In a book dedicated to experience design, it is only logical to allocate a chapter to the nature of experience. The challenge was how to cover a topic that is like the ocean--enormously wide, deep and rich with mysteries. Despite thinking that spans thousands of years, fields such as neuro science, cognitive, social and organizational psychology, behavioral economics or artificial intelligence did not exist a century ago. Even the academic study of emotions is just a few decades old.

I am a practicing experience strategist, architect, and designer. Although the word "experience" is part of my title, much of what I learned about the physiology, psychology, and philosophy of experience, is self-taught, because my formal education focused primarily on screenwriting...